S. Awan is a failed journalist, a student of history, a lover of music, film, culture, and an enthusiast of the the controversial and the weird.
Also a musician, and part-time freelance, involuntary human being. Also occasionally lives on the moon. Also is a ghost. And a cigarette butt that hasn't been put out properly; so, you know, there's still, like, smoke coming out of it and stuff...

It’s been difficult to ignore or avoid the massive coverage, controversy and debate surrounding the ‘ISIS bride’Shamima Begum that has dominated British news in the passed week or so.

The massively inflated ‘scandal’ has created differences in opinion over what should be done with her, whether her citizenship should be revoked, whether she should be allowed back into the UK, etc.

I personally have no interest in Shamima Begum: basically a dumb girl who drank the Islamic State Kool-Aid, went to start a new life in the Wild West, and now wants to come home because the ‘adventure’ has crumbled to dust.

However, the entire ‘controversy’ over what to do with British kids who went over to Syria or Iraq to live in (or fight for) the ‘caliphate’ seems to me to be a massive distraction strategy: it’s aim being to get everyone fired up over highly divisive idiots and their dumb decisions or their radicalisation… while completely failing to register the role of the government and the state in the entire misbegotten saga.

In effect, all of the focus and debate is over a nineteen year-old girl who made a shitty decision when she was 15: so that none of the focus or debate is on more important aspects of the equation that she became a tiny part of. (more…)

You know, sometimes you start out with a simple question.

And you start exploring for possible answers to that question; only to end up falling down a deeper rabbit-hole than you had expected. Then you just end up with more questions.

A lot of coverage was given to Donald Trump’s decision apparently to announce withdrawal of US troops from Syria. My initial question was simply why the US President had suddenly announced this: and why the Defense Secretary James Mattis had resigned in response.

But instead this has become a much longer article, linking up everything from Syria, Libya and Africa to China, the possible nature of the ‘Trump vs China’ pantomime, possible groundwork for a future ‘New World Order’ control model and the ‘armies’ of the future, and even Cambridge Analytica.

As it happens, the reason is because one man – one machiavellian, enigmatic figure – appears to be a nexus connecting all of these seemingly disparate things. (more…)

You will have seen the headlines over the last week, concerning the ‘evacuation’ of the White Helmets from Syria.

With the regime-change operation in Syria appearing to have stalled in either stalemate or failure (depending on who you ask), the Western-funded proxies had to be rescued – probably before Syrian government forces could capture them, torture them and also possibly find out where the group had come from, who was funding them and where their instructions were coming from.

Or, you know, maybe it is just a well-meaning humanitarian operation to rescue “heroes” from danger. If so, it’s a very selective one.

The extraction operation was apparently conducted by Israel and Jordan, but at the request of several Western governments who were apparently concerned for the White Helmets’ safety.

According to the BBC, the Israeli IDF – which has a history of aiding anti-government militias and fighters in Syria via the Golan Heights – said it was acting at the request of the UK, the US and other nations. (more…)

Am I the only one who can’t quite work out what happened last weekend in Syria or what it’s all supposed to mean?

That is, I can’t work out what the US-UK-France Triumvirate (the same Triumvirate that led the intervention against Gaddafi in Libya) was trying to do when it decided to carry out strikes against alleged chemical weapons locations in Syria.

It’s all been a bit confused. Which is one reason I haven’t commented on any of it until now. The other reason is that the night of the military action (Friday 13th) was the day I was burying my grandfather: and so I had no interest in writing anything or keeping track of events at that time.

But it also allowed me to delay or withhold opinion and just keep an unbiased eye on the news for a few days to see how things unfolded.

The mess that’s been created in Syria is extraordinary.

Syria is also definitively where international law died. Arguably, Iraq and Libya saw international law already collapsing: but Syria is where even all pretense of international law died. It is where borders, sovereignty and the right to self-determination got tossed out the window.

It is also where compassion, logic, reason, diplomacy, and truth, all seem to have died – along with journalism and along with probably the United Nations – their corpses rotting in the desert for all to see.

I want to explore here the subject of why international law is so important; why it is dead; and why I blame not just governments and military regimes, but journalists and the media. (more…)

With the fiftieth anniversary of the My Lai massacre, it freshly occured to me that the harrowing subject of My Lai actually also sheds some light on the reality of the decline in real journalism in the modern age.

I would assert that you can track the decline in the integrity and purpose of mainstream journalism by tracking the standing of a specific journalist named Seymour Hersh.

So, firstly, why is Hersh regarded as such an important journalist?

Well, it was a piece of investigative journalism by Hersh decades ago that exposed the war crime committed by US forces in My Lai in Vietnam. The My Lai massacre was the mass murder of unarmed Vietnamese civilians (somewhere between 347 and 504 people) by American troops in South Vietnam in 1968. (more…)

When it comes to Syria, you can set your watch for all the different acts in the stage-play that is the mass-media and international coverage.

I referred to Syria previously as ‘Syria the Movie’, in regard especially to the media production company known as the White Helmets. It’s a movie with endless sequels: and the script and structure never changes, the dialogue is all the same.

First up, let’s make an obvious prediction: there’s going to be another staged ‘chemical attack’ very soon – if not in the next few days, then definitely in the next few weeks. (more…)

It’s a story that seemed to suddenly blow up out of nowhere. And it resulted in Pritti Patel being called back from Nairobi to meet with the Prime Minister – after which she immediately resigned from office.

The reason, we are told, was a breach of protocol – Patel had failed to inform the appropriate government departments of unofficial meetings she had had with various Israeli officials.

The ‘age of stupid’ is the only term I can think of for framing this ongoing nonsense.

President Trump and members of his administration have taken the questionable approach of stating outright that the US will respond severely if the Syrian government carries out another chemical attack on civilians.

More than that, it is insisting that Damascus is planning said attack and claims to have proof of this. (more…)

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